Microsoft Revamps Office Web Apps UI, Introduces New Features

Microsoft has given its Office Web Apps a UI revamp, bringing new features along with more fluid navigation. For the uninformed, Office Web Apps offers free versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. The latter allows anyone to edit files on SkyDrive.

Although Microsoft hasn't gone official with these changes, the company has already confirmed that it did introduce these updates to Tech Crunch. Frederic Lardinois from the Tech Crunch team has noted most obvious change - a new navigation for the OneNote note-taking app, which now shows two columns on the left to let you traverse between the different sections of your notebooks more conveniently.

Other notable modifications include the designs of the top menu across all the apps and the Ribbon menu across the board, as well as the addition of a "Tell me what you want to do" search bar in Word and Excel apps that enables you to search through all of the app's tools and invoke actions, i.e. bolding text, or finding and replacing straight from the search results. It also utilizes type-ahead, so you'll only require a few keystrokes to get what you need. This tool will be available in the PowerPoint web app in the near future.

Also tweaked is the header UI, to feature a switcher which provides access to other online Microsoft experiences. Finally, you can add "polish to reports and papers with new footnotes and endnotes".